Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America by Brett Malcolm Grainger

Abstract

Reviewed by: Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America by Brett Malcolm Grainger Richard E. Brantley (bio) Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America Brett Malcolm Grainger Harvard University Press, 2019. 280 pp. $46.50 hardcover. Brett Malcolm Grainger's full-scale, complete, thoroughly researched, delightfully written account of the Second Great Awakening boasts both scope and focus. His immersion in the "cheap prints and lithographs" and "published journals, poems, short stories" and "shape-note hymnals" of pre-Civil War American evangelicals—including some 1,500,000 Methodists and 1,100,000 Baptists—makes the scholarly fuss about 14,000 Unitarians seem like provincial overkill (3, 11). And his presiding idea—"a shared culture of nature" within the "everyday…mentality" of "clergy and laity, northerners and southerners, Calvinists and Arminians, men and women, black and white" (3, 11)—pulls together a miscellany. His complex and subtle yet clear and well-integrated perspective on a hitherto incompletely understood topic in American studies spotlights a demotic combination of natural philosophy with natural theology. As a bonus, his loving attention to details of quoted language carries over to his reverence for belles-lettres at the seminar table. "In general," Grainger writes, "antebellum revivalists…perceived in themselves and in the natural world an energetic presence they described as the Holy Spirit" (208). Hannah Bunting and William Walker used the liber naturalis not to escape "stifling orthodoxies" but to enhance "spiritual transformation" and build "relationship between the spiritual senses and the common senses" (62-65). The African American female preacher Zilpah Elaw "read the books of scripture and nature side by side" and showed "a typical Methodist canniness for fudging dicey theological questions" as she asked whether "contemplative vision" should engage the "physical world directly…or inwardly" (96-97). And in a fusion of European and African traditions, African American folksongs deployed natural imagery—"I know moon-rise, I know star-rise"—to express the ideal of "physical and spiritual liberation" (95). Nighttime brought "relative freedom for slaves" (95). If, through bloodletting, blistering, vomiting, and intestinal purging, Dr. Benjamin Rush sought to drive unwanted nature out, then evangelical medical reformers, for their part, invited the healing power of water in. And by means of chemical analysis they claimed scientific rationale, distinct from the "superstitions" at Lourdes (135). At the Methodist-physician Henry Foster's "Clifton Springs Water Cure" in upstate New York, water was "all business," all the time (153). There, as opposed to the more relaxed atmosphere at White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, patients were [End Page 152] wrapped for hours in wet sheets, and exhorted to stand under cataracts. The Congregational-physician Erastus Root "exemplified the evangelical natural philosopher" and in An Inaugural Dissertation on the Chemical and Medicinal Properties of the Mineral Springs in Guilford, Vermont (1817) argued against hypothetical systems in nature-cure practice and in evangelical theology alike (160). Grainger resourcefully traces evangelical aversion to speculation back to the inductive method of Bacon and of Milton in his Baconian mood (246). The ur-Methodist John Wesley's Enlightenment-tempered electrotherapy morphed into the Romantic-era evangelicals' "ethereal fire" of "mystical agency" (174-175). Just as the itinerant-Baptist medical reformer T. Gale "gushed" that "We hail thee, adorable ELECTRICITY! late arrived, or lately known, the friend of human life—with celestial blessings surcharged… to bid the dying live," so the Methodist bishop William McKendree "sang the body electric"—that is, he described the Holy Spirit as a "Selistial [sic] power" running "through ever [sic] power of [his] body" (177-78). And just as Bethany College student W. T. Moore declared that, in electricity, "the Material and Spiritual universes approach near to each other, if, indeed, it is not the point at which they meet," so, in Grainger's words, electricity "was the neck in the cosmic hourglass," "a switching station between matter and spirit that facilitated a constant flow of traffic between the natural and supernatural worlds, without challenging their basic dualistic relationship" (179-80). The theology of electricity formed the basis of friendship between Congregationalists Edward Hitchcock and Theophilus Packard. The Amherst College president and the mesmerist, respectively, joined electrotherapy with animal magnetism to pursue "a middle way...